Articles by
David

Tierney Sneed has been all over this story since the night of the final presidential debate, when it bubbled into the open: whether the RNC was violating that decades-old consent decree it is saddled with by virtue of having an atrocious record of trying to deny minorities their right to vote.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent more of my time on this story than any other we've been covering, so I was eager to see the ruling from the federal court in New Jersey that was handling the case.

One of the challenges for journalists on the trail covering any presidential campaign is that the stump speeches become a sort of metronomic monotony. After a few weeks or months of hearing the same themes and the same canned lines over and over, you begin to listen only for what is new or different, and everything else becomes background noise. This isn't a news flash. It's just one of the hazards of the job, but in a real sense it colors the coverage in its own way.

That allegedly defamatory campaign TV ad that Cliven Bundy is suing a Democratic congressional candidate over in Nevada? The campaign says no such ad exists, and Bundy's lawyer tells TPM, “I have not seen the TV ad myself.”

Federal judge in North Carolina is deeply skeptical of the state's process in which anyone can challenge and purge voters from the voting rolls: "This sounds like something that was put together in 1901," she told lawyers for the state, who are defending the law and the thousands of purges carried out under it in the last few weeks. The NAACP is suing.

Violating political and constitutional norms is not only the province of Donald Trump. What is happening on the Senate side, with GOP senators making campaign promises to block ANY Hillary Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court – permanently – defies any conventional understanding of the advice and consent role.

We covered this extensively yesterday, but I'm still not sure it's breaking through in the national political conversation.

The DNC cites last week's story by Tierney Sneed in its legal filing today seeking to have the RNC held in contempt by a federal court for violating that decades-old consent decree that bars it from engaging in euphemistic "ballot security" measures. I mention that not to brag on Tierney (though it is a good story) as much as direct you to some of the key backstory on how Donald Trump dragged the RNC into this mess.

The irony of Donald Trump perhaps consigning the RNC to another eight years of federal court supervision under a consent decree that has already lasted more than 30 years may be one of the richer ironies of the 2016 election. Tierney Sneed has more on today's big late breaking legal development on the campaign trail.